Don’t talk about the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Honestly even with all the caveats you can point to I was still more than ready to label Biden as the greatest president of my lifetime (for whatever that is worth) just for that barring any truly insane developments…and then the world said “hold my beer”.

I’ve taken a small break from the sf6 grind. Need to reset myself a bit both to rediscover my drive and also unlearn some bad habits.

-I beat silent Hill remake. I liked it although I’m not quite sure what to make of the whole thing overall. Mainly I do think the whole thing is like 8 hours two long and I would like an abbreviation to match what I hear the original was like. I got the “bad” ending but tbh it seemed like a satisfactory end for Sunderland.

-did the Valhalla dlc for god of war now that its on PC. Good stuff. Shades of Hades. That conclusion and monologue was legit.

-my son and I have been playing little nightmares 2 together. We did part one for Halloween and now we’re knew deep in the sequel.

-i feel since silent Hill and outer wilds echoes of the she I can actually kinda do horror finally.

Next on my playlist is probably last of us on PC…but I still need to play disco Elysium.

In terms of public sentiment I am pretty positive. Communism is becoming less and less of an effective Boogeyman each cycle and while GenZ does seem like a problem due to its reactionary gender/race identity politics I actually think there’s reason to believe class based approach would gain some significant ground.

Here’s the problem and why I remain not super enthusiastic and bordering on doomer: The last few election cycles have really showed that there are zero shortcuts here. The democratic party will straight up nuke itself before it allows an economically populist left movement take it over. If they didn’t show that in 2016 or 2020 they hella fucking showed that in 2024.

People may broadly be coming around to like the idea of socialism and communism…but I think most of those people probably still in the mindset that we need to run leftwing candidates and vote our way to socialism.

Maybe we’ll get there eventually…but I think we are a long way from people being ready to actually do direct action…and it’s clear to me that’s what its gonna take.

What the fuck?! I’ve seen some similar tales from content creators now…is this a “Ok ok, I know we tried to gaslight you and all but we get it, actually the economy isn’t great for you!”

I would challenge you and say that your issues is less being a stereotype and more that you are insecure and feel like your personality or feelings are somehow less valid because you fall into a “type”. Do you not like having long hair? Do you not like smoking weed? If you like those things and feel like these are good representations of your truest self…I’d focus on surrounding yourself with people who embrace you for these aspects.

I used to be super insecure when people started labeling me as a “himbo” because I had this idea in my head that cynical snark was a more valid or unique personality type. Trust me: nothing worse or unattractive than being a fake person. Embrace being the quirky long haired pothead child of suburbia if that’s who you are. You are valid comrade!

Are these people even aware that Biden is still the fucking president right now??? Jesus christ more than racist they are just fucking stupid.

How about we just execute Biden instead? Same result and way cleaner.

As much as I fucking love Deus Ex…I think maybe we don’t want Spector on the lathe again.

His ability to so succinctly and perfectly cut through the bullshit and nail it is a legit fucking superpower and I’m jealous.

Omfg!!! Incredible.

Incredible. I genuinely gave the libs too much credit as I thought they’d at least wait for the transition to start giving a shit.

Everyone should take the opportunity to remind these people that not only is Biden still the president, he is still supporting and funding Israel right now even after his party lost at least in part due to their stand on this.

Palestinian lives are nothing but a prop to these sociopaths.

There’s a lot of aspects about it I really like…but as a complete piece…it’s just not there for me. Take Luke Skywalker’s cynical turn for example. On paper: fucking love it. There’s that meme going around showing young and old luke with young college philosophy graduate and jaded Marxist professor.

But like…if you’re going to have earnestly eternal optimist Luke turn cynical it has to be from a failure of that optimism to have positive results rather than a failure to follow it. Luke being tempted to kill kylo ren makes sense to me…but I don’t get how he concluded his entire philosophy and worldview was wrong when by his own admission it was a “moment of weakness” where he almost did the most contradictory thing to his own philosophy that he’s ever done. If anything I think that whole fallout would have made him double down.

So much of the movie is like that. Good pieces in isolation but none of them quite work.

That being said: it’s the best by far of the sequel trilogy. Rise of Skywalker is a dumpster fire. Force awakens is a pandering cynical cash grab with nothing worthwhile to say or add that gets progressively worse every year.

Last Jedi feels like it’s made by an actual artist with something to say…even if what he’s saying just doesn’t quite hit.

Lmao, wut??? Like the old saying goes, you shouldn’t call it a comeback when he’s been here the whole time.

For what it’s worth: I think most of those people are also crushingly lonely and alienated…because those things are due to material conditions more than what you’ve read.

Reading tons of shit and educating yourself doesn’t make you any more lonely and alienated so much as it helps you correctly diagnose and identify the source of those things. Also doesn’t give you any sort of special power/ability to fix it on your own though.

Kind of what I was thinking. I think if I want to be charitable he’s not saying he can’t write at all, or even that he can’t write capeshit, but that he can’t write from the optimistic perspective that these larger than life symbols can inspire us to do good and be better versions of ourselves. IE: Alan Moore was right all along (what a shock).

What’s sad is that it almost seems like his immediate instinct is that he has to phone in and fake that optimism because that’s the limits of the genre he’s working in. Personally I hope he does some soul searching and realizes that a cynical turn for his voice is entirely acceptable and not necessarily a decline.

My response would be, that’s a cynical tactic you could opt for but I don’t think it’s a winning message both because:

A) while you can spin it that way: I don’t think the data we have really bears that out and I think it’s easy to call out as spin.

B) this cycle has left me especially cynical about converting the democratic party. Even though the spoiler effect wound up not mattering in the grand scheme, the Democrats definitely were nervous about it and they still opted for this direction. Given the choice between losing and shifting left, it seems to me like they will choose losing.

Sure, that’s not a non factor…but I think you’d be hard pressed to quantify that in any sort of objective/concrete way.

At that point you’re basically saying “If more people had shown up and voted for Kamala, she would have won”. Like…no shit. Cool story bro. The fact is: they didn’t show up and you can’t really definitively say why. I actually wish I could say it was because of Gaza but I think that’s extremely wishful thinking. The reality is there were probably a whole host of reasons people didn’t turn out.

Get ready to repost these fucking numbers ad naseum every single time a liberal tries to scapegoat leftists.

Their next cope when they realize the math doesn’t math enough to blame leftists is gonna probably be to blame the millions of voters who sat this one out rather than doing their civic duty and voting for Harris. The obvious response to that would be that we could have just as easily had President Claudia De La Cruz if we’re just allowed to add non voters however the fuck we feel like but while it will be fun to dunk I don’t see that getting through to them. Something something can only be failed.

It seriously just fucking boggles my mind and I desperately want to know what data they had which told them this was a good idea.

I recognize this is entirely anecdotal but: basically multiple generations of my entire family for like the first 24 years of my life were die hard suburban Republicans. Lifetime members of the NRA, Absolute Reagan worshippers, and they all even voted twice for fucking Bush. They all love Liz Cheney to varying extents but guess what: every single one of them voted twice for Obama and rebranded as staunch resistance Libs in 2016. They haven’t voted republican in over a decade!

She was run out of the republican party for a fucking reason. Again I genuinely want to see fucking numbers because I cannot understand who this would appeal to that wasn’t already registered to vote as a democrat. Baffling.

The most frustrating part of this sentiment is that it frankly gives us too much fucking credit. I genuinely wish we could take credit for this result…but there’s a bit of a problem with trying to scapegoat lefties this time around. Hilary wasn’t owed green votes in 2016 either but it was at least true that if she had gotten them the election was close enough she could have clinched it. Michigan was basically the one state in 2024 where the spoiler effect really could have been enough of a factor to deny Harris a win but it turned out they didn’t even fucking matter in the end.

2024 is a clear decisive Trump victory. There’s no way around it. They’re in just in full on denial and finger pointing trying to say the radical left cost them this one.